The “Queen” most humbly apologizes for the delay, and would like to say likely any of our hard-core awesome Byzantiners could have taken this one!

This is mostly based on Ch 5 of The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society by Shaun Tougher from 2008, which is pretty easily available through libraries if you’d like to get the real scoop. He and Kathryn Ringrose are probably the two main scholars for Roman/Byzantine eunuchs, Tougher has a book on Roman eunuchs coming out in 2015 too which I am very much looking forward to.

There’s two main transformations in their roles, a gradual increase in the amount of roles either specifically inscribed for them or allowed to them, and then a secondary transition from having eunuchs strictly as an “import” product (slavery) to castrating native-born sons for court service. So the transformation is, in simple terms, an evolution from an elite slave to a special class of politician, either native or non-native.

I’m not exactly sure when to put the start date of the transformation, as Roman --> Byzantine is pretty nebulous, but the Byzantine empire certainly inherited its use of eunuchs from the Roman empire, which had eunuchs as a special subset of slaves, ideally gotten from outside the empire. (This was also in line with Islamic attitudes towards eunuchs at the time.)

The most traditional role of eunuchs (inherited from the Roman Empire) is that of close, personal servants to the emperor and empress. But as time went on they gained ground. The Klētorologion of Philotheos from the end of the 9th century gives us a “snapshot” listing of official eunuch roles. 8 titles and 10 offices are officially for eunuchs, alone, with only 3 offices that could not be held by eunuchs. The rest of the offices were not reserved for one or the other, and were often filled by eunuchs, including several high-ranking positions in the military that eunuchs could take. There’s also some flexibility to this, eunuchs were known to fill officially-non-eunuch roles, for instance in the 7th century a eunuch held the non-eunuch office “father of the city” (eparch), while non-eunuch Basil the Macedonian held the post Parakoimomenos (essentially “chief eunuch”) in the 9th century!

Around the 9th or 10th century native-born eunuchs start to show up. A 10th century Arab writer does casually record that the Byzantines castrated their own just like the Chinese, and the 10th and 11th centuries are full of very explicitly native born important eunuchs, but Tougher puts the 9th century as the start date using the rather sound logic that several prominent eunuchs of the 10th century were castrated during the 9th, and identifies several likely-native eunuchs of the 9th century. This means many eunuchs are now going to be free men with families, which has some big implications in their agency and potential influence in society.

So yeah, kinda the fast and dirty on Byzantine eunuchs, hope it was worth the wait!